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Creating intellectual property is an Art, not a Science. It’s inexact and can be wasteful.

In the case of big multinational ad agencies, with offices everywhere around the globe, the waste is obvious. Take an agency with 200 or more offices; chances are that only 5 or 10 of those offices are truly magnificent creative shops, capable of coming up with home run after home run. When it comes to multinational and Big Ideas, the mythical “20/80 rule” is probably more like a 5/95 at best.

For some Advertisers, contracting 200 offices makes sense, especially if they are lacking a cohesive global network of their own. For most, however, the traditional model is becoming uneconomical. They end up paying for what is predominantly a distribution system with inefficiencies and duplication (and often turf wars). A much better approach is to cherry pick the best offices in the agency network and custom tailor the compensation to output from these offices.

Today, campaigns can be created centrally or regionally and distributed locally through services known as “decoupling.” The creative agency creates the idea and produces the video and hands over the assets to the decoupling company for translation and then adaptation to local market and distribution. Common in Europe for about a decade, more U.S. based global marketers are now switching to decouple implementation from creation. This improves transparency, as marketers can manage the process more effectively using proprietary dashboards. Decoupling is the most powerful force in Advertising is the past 60 years. It means that even a small, single office, whether in Chicago or Charlotte, can become a virtual global network. The monopoly of the global ad agency networks on working with global marketers is about to end.

I believe that over the next few years the big agencies will start reducing redundancies in their footprint, as clients scale back compensation to elite offices that produce business-building ideas. Portland, OR-based Wieden+Kennedy, which works for top clients like Nike, Coca-Cola and P&G, among others, has offices in only 8 countries. London-based BBH, another top creative shop that works with Unilever and British Airways, has offices in only 7 countries.

Reducing the number of international offices, together with the emergence of mini-networks like W+K and BBH will change the agency landscape. As technology adoption accelerates, it will enable of local market implementation from regional hubs.

The squeeze on agency margins that we have witnessed on Madison Avenue in recent years will lead to something resembling the demise of the studio system in Hollywood. Then, as now, external economic pressures resulted in many studios buckling under unsustainable overhead in the 50s. The unbundling of the lucrative distribution system from the overhead-heavy movie making operations was devastating for the studios.

It led to the replacement of the studio system with ad-hoc assembling of creative teams for a movie project. Advertising too is likely to start relying more and more on freelance talent to be assembled for creative projects ad-hoc.

I believe that agencies will eventually evolve from using many “contract players”, on-staff art directors and copywriters to hiring freelancers, perhaps maintaining a small on-staff team of creative directors for the purposes of quality control. Production can be easily outsourced, to independents or the decoupling firms, who would want a slice of an incredibly lucrative aspect of the ad business. So can most other services – from strategists to project managers.

The Advertising business is about to go à la carte.

Avi Dan is the founder of Avidan Strategies, a marketing consulting firm that specializes in business and marketing advice, agency search, compensation, and advertising strategy. He spent 30 years in senior account management and business development positions with leading global agencies.